The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

Peter had been sent away to school at the age of eleven, first to Nantwich school in Cheshire and then, briefly, also to St Bees, at which establishments he would have received a gentleman’s usual diet of religious instruction and Latin. His teacher at Nantwich had published books on Livy and Tacitus, and so one may hazard that young Peter had his fill of these. Unlike Fletcher, however, a seagoing career of some kind had probably been on the cards for Peter, regardless of changed family circumstances; the number of naval and military careers in the Heywood pedigree suggests this was an honoured tradition. Peter’s first naval service had been aboard the Powerful, in 1786. The Powerful, however, had never left Plymouth Harbour. As this represented his only naval experience prior to joining the Bounty, he had not yet served at sea.

Peter’s position as a young gentleman and an AB on the Bounty came through the sympathetic and pitying offices of William Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, a friend of the Heywoods. ‘He is an ingenious young Lad & has always been a favorite of mine & indeed every body here,’ Betham wrote to Bligh from Douglas, thanking him for taking Peter under his wing. ‘And indeed the Reason of my insisting so strenuously upon his going the Voyage with you is that after I had mentioned the matter to Mrs Bligh, his Family have fallen into a great deal of Distress on account of their Father’s losing the Duke of Atholl’s Business, and I thought it would not appear well in me to drop this matter if it cou’d possibly be done without any prejudice to you, as this wou’d seem deserting them in their adversity, and I found they wou’d regard it as a great Disappointment.’ Betham did not apparently envisage young Peter’s duties as being particularly nautical. ‘I hope he will be of some Service to you, so far as he is able, in writing or looking after any necessary matters under your charge,’ Betham had added, vaguely.

In the summer of 1787, Mr Heywood accompanied his son from the Isle of Man to Liverpool. Here he bade Peter goodbye, entrusting him to the care of friends who were travelling to London by chaise along the long, rough road, each carrying a pair of loaded pistols as a guard against highwaymen. Once at Deptford, as another token of Bligh’s efforts for the young man, Peter stayed with Bligh and his wife at their lodgings while the Bounty was being equipped. Christian had relatives in London of his own to visit, including an uncle and his brother John, who had moved here after his bankruptcy. Given Christian’s already close association with Bligh, it would be incredible that he too did not visit the Bligh household at this time. ‘You have danced my children upon your knee,’ Bligh would remind the master’s mate at a later date.

Also joining the Bounty, rated as a nominal AB, was another fallen aristocrat of sorts, twenty-one-year-old Edward Young. Edward was the nephew of Sir George Young, a distinguished naval captain and future admiral who had served in both the Royal Navy and the East India Company. ‘As I do not know all his exploits,’ one memorialist offered breezily, ‘I can only state that he was employed…in several services requiring nautical skill and British courage.’ Since 1784, George Young had been an advocate, with Sir Joseph Banks, of establishing the New South Wales colony, which he envisaged would serve as a port of call for ships on the China trade and more unexpectedly a centre for the cultivation of flax. A paper outlining his proposal became a cornerstone of the government’s eventual establishment of a penal colony near Botany Bay. It is probable that it was through his connection with Banks that Young had approached Bligh about a position for Edward.

However, there is no family record of a nephew called Edward. On the Bounty muster, Edward is entered as coming from ‘St Kitt’s’, and a near contemporary reference mentions him as ‘half-caste’. He was described by Bligh as roughly five foot eight in height, with a dark complexion ‘and rather a bad look’. Young had dark brown hair, was ‘Strong Made’ and had ‘lost several of his Fore teeth, and those that remain are all Rotten; a Small Mole on the left Side of the throat.’ If Edward was indeed a nephew of Sir George, it is most likely that his father had been Robert Young, a younger brother who had died in 1781 on St Helena while captain of the East India Company’s Vansittart. Whereas other distinguished families associated with the Bounty would be loud in their opinions, news of the mutiny was met with a thundering silence by the Youngs. If Edward had been born on the wrong side of the blanket, there may have been relief when he vanished from the picture altogether.

Yet another young gentleman, George Stewart from the Orkney Islands, joined the Bounty as a midshipman, but was rerated AB before the ship sailed (the ship’s fixed allotment of two midshipman positions required judicious management on Bligh’s part). Bligh had met Stewart seven years earlier, when the Resolution had called at Stromness at the end of her long and harrowing voyage. In their home, the Whitehouse, overlooking the harbour and the bustling town with its inns and taverns, Alexander and Margaret Stewart, George’s parents, had entertained Bligh.

Like so many of the Bounty’s young gentlemen, George Stewart could trace an old and distinguished lineage. His father’s family could be traced back to King Robert II, in the thirteenth century; his mother could trace her descent back to Danes who had settled the Orkneys in the ninth century. Alexander Stewart had been born and lived on Ronaldsay in the Orkneys, but had moved to Stromness for his children’s schooling; he and his wife had eight children, of whom George was the eldest. Apparently, when word of the Bounty’s voyage reached them, the Stewarts had reminded Bligh of their former acquaintance; surely the stories the young master had told the Stewart family seven years earlier, upon his return from the Pacific had made George’s interest in this particular voyage especially keen.

When he came down to Deptford to join the Bounty, George Stewart was twenty-one years old and ‘five feet seven inches high’, according to Bligh, who continued with an unprepossessing description: ‘High, good Complexion, Dark Hair, Slender Made, Narrow chested, and long Neck, Small Face and Black Eyes.’

The last of the Bounty’s young gentlemen was fifteen-year-old John Hallett from London, the son of John Hallett, an architect, and his wife, Hannah. He had four younger brothers, all of whom would later be employed by the East India Company, and one half-sister, the ‘natural child’ of Mr Hallett. Midshipman Hallett’s father was a wealthy man, with a residence in Manchester Buildings, a gentlemen’s row of private houses situated just off the Thames, almost opposite Westminster Bridge and in strolling distance of St James’s Park. The Halletts, like the Haywards, belonged to the energetic, gentlemanly professional class possessed of actual skills – doctors and architects as opposed to seneschals or bankrupt country lawyers.

Hallett Senior moved in a distinguished circle of artists, including members of the Royal Academy. His niece had married into a prosperous family of merchants and shipbuilders, with a home in fashionable Tunbridge, where Mr Hallett was often found. From diarist Joseph Farington, who recorded a number of dinners and other social occasions at which Mr Hallett was present, we are given a glimpse of the Bounty midshipman’s circle: ‘Mr. Hallett spoke of several persons who from a low beginning had made great fortunes,’ Farington noted after a London dinner, going on to describe a leather breeches maker now established on Bond Street and said to be worth £150,000. War with Russia would only ruin Russia’s trade, as England could do without her goods. A neighbour recently died having ‘expended £50,000 it was not well known how’ – all good solid, middle-class, mercantile discussion.

Young John Hallett was already well on the road to a naval career when he joined the Bounty. He had been entered on the books as a lieutenant’s servant in 1777, at the age of five, and on the books of four subsequent ships as a captain’s servant. Prior to joining the Bounty, he had been on the Alarm, which had paid off in Port Royal, Jamaica, when the ship was taken out of commission. This had occurred four years previously, and one assumes young Hallett, at age eleven, was getting his schooling during the interim. John Hallett Sr appears to have been acquainted with Banks, and wrote to him thanking him for getting his son’s position. While the Bounty was swarming with young gentlemen – officers in training, midshipmen in waiting – the only two to hold the coveted midshipmen’s slots were Thomas Hayward and John Hallett, both protégés of Banks.

In early October, Bligh prepared the Bounty to leave the Thames for Spithead, Portsmouth, where he was to await official orders to sail. The ship, now copper-sheathed, had been completely refitted and was stuffed with supplies – not just the food stores, clothing or ‘slops’, fuel, water, rum and bulk necessities, but all the miscellaneous minutiae of the gardener’s trade, as inventoried on a list supplied by Banks: paper, pens, ink, India ink, ‘Colours of all kinds’, spade, pins, wire, fly traps, an insect box, bottles, knives, ‘Journal Books & other usefull Books’, guns and gunpowder, shot and flints, and ‘Trinkets for the Natives’, which included mirrors and eighty pounds of white, blue and red glass beads. Bligh had also been given sixty-one ducats and forty-five Spanish dollars for the purchase of plants. Eight hundred variously sized pots for the breadfruit plants had been stowed, but as David Nelson reported to Banks plaintively, ‘as I have only room for 600, the remainder may possibly be broken.’ The pots had been made extra deep for drainage by ‘Mr. Dalton, potter’, near Deptford Creek.

Every British naval seaman brought certain expectations to each ship he joined. He expected to endure hard labour in raw conditions, and was ever mindful that he was vulnerable to harsh and often arbitrary punishment at the hands of his officers. He expected to eat very specifically measured amounts of rank food, and to drink much liquor. Above all, he expected to exist for the duration of his service in stifling, unhygienic squalor. There would be no privacy. As the official naval allotment of fourteen inches sleeping space for each man suggests, space was always at a premium – but nowhere more so than on the little Bounty, now crammed with supplies for eighteen months’ voyaging and trade. Her fo’c’sle, an unventilated, windowless area of 22 by 36 feet, was shared by thirty-three men, while the maximum height between decks amidships was 5 feet 7 inches – the average height of the men she carried. The master’s mates, midshipmen, and young gentlemen – Fletcher Christian and a William Elphinstone, Hayward and Hallett, Peter Heywood, George Stewart, Edward Young and Robert Tinkler – were all quartered directly behind Bligh’s little pantry, separated, it is suggested, merely by canvas walls.

On deck, amid the piles of stores, were the Bounty’s three boats. The Navy Board had placed an order for these as early as June, but the usual supplier, swamped with other work, had been forced to cry off. The Board then turned to a private contractor to build a launch of 20 feet in length with copper fastenings, and to the Deal boatyard for a cutter and a jolly boat of 18 and 16 feet, respectively. For reasons known only to himself, Bligh requested of the Navy Board that the launch and cutter, which had already been supplied, be replaced with larger models. The Board complied, and thus was acquired one of the most historic craft in maritime history, the Bounty’s 23-foot-long, 2-foot-9-inch-deep launch.

On 9 October 1787, a drear, dull day, the pilot arrived to take the Bounty out of the Thames on the first leg of her voyage. In the Long Reach she received her gunner’s stores. Officially designated as an ‘Armed Vessel’, she was equipped with ‘four short four-pounder carriage guns and ten half-pounder swivel guns’, to quote the Admiralty’s directive – a laughably meagre firepower. Additionally, there were small arms, muskets, powder and bayonets, all locked in the arms chest, supposedly at all times under the key of the ship’s master, John Fryer.

The Bounty herself was in her glory – newly fitted out to the tune of thousands of pounds, sails set, piled with stores, guns gleaming and swarming with her men, the midshipmen in their smart blue coats, Bligh in his blue-and-white-piped lieutenant’s uniform with its bright gilt buttons, and the seamen in their long, baggy trousers and boxy jackets: Charles Churchill, with his disfigured hand showing ‘the Marks of a Severe Scald’; German-speaking Henry Hilbrant, strong and sandy-haired, but with ‘His Left Arm Shorter than the other having been broke’; Alexander Smith, ‘Very much pitted’ with smallpox, and bearing an axe scar on his right foot; John Sumner, slender, fair and with a ‘Scar upon the left Cheek’; William McCoy, scarred by a stab wound in the belly; William Brown, the gardener, also fair and slender, but bearing a ‘remarkable Scar on one of his Cheeks Which contracts the Eye Lid and runs down to his throat.’ With the knowledge of hindsight, they are a piratical-looking crew.

The Bounty lingered at Long Reach for nearly a week before receiving orders to proceed to Spithead, the naval anchorage outside Portsmouth Harbour. But ‘the winds and weather were so unfavorable’, in Bligh’s words, that the short journey down the Thames and around the coast took nearly three weeks to complete.

‘I have been very anxious to acquaint you of my arrival here, which I have now accomplished with some risk,’ Bligh wrote to Banks on 5 November from Spithead. ‘I anchored here last night, after being drove on the coast of France in a very heavy gale.’ His plan, as he now related, was to make as swiftly as possible for Cape Horn in order to squeak through a diminishing window of opportunity for rounding the tempestuous Cape so late in the season; as he observed to Banks, ‘if I get the least slant round the Cape I must make the most of it.’ Bligh was awaiting not only a break in the weather, but also his sailing orders, without which he could not sail. He did not, however, anticipate any difficulties, noting that ‘the Commissioner promises me every assistance, and I have no doubt but the trifles I have to do here will be soon accomplished.’

The days passed and the weather broke, and still Bligh’s sailing orders did not arrive. As the delay lengthened, his wife, Betsy, broke off nursing their youngest daughter, who was stricken with smallpox, and came down from their home in Wapping to take lodgings in Portsmouth. With impotent exasperation, Bligh watched other ships weigh anchor and slip serenely down the Channel, in the fair, fine weather. Each day that passed, as he knew, reduced the odds of a good passage around the Horn.

There had already been warning signs that the Bounty’s voyage, so beloved to Joseph Banks, did not stand quite so high in Admiralty eyes. Back in September, Bligh had received a distinguished visitor at the Deptford docks. Lord Selkirk, a Scottish earl, ostensibly came down to use his interest to find a position for his son’s tutor, William Lockhead, who was ‘an enthusiast in regard to Natural History’ and ‘most anxious to go round the World with Mr. Bligh’; Selkirk’s son, the Honourable Dunbar Douglas, was already set to join the Bounty as yet another gentleman ‘able seaman’. With his own son destined to sail with her, Selkirk took a closer look than most at the Bounty; alarmed at what he had seen, he wrote a frank and urgent report to Banks, drawing attention to ominous deficiencies.

The rating of Bligh’s vessel as a cutter, and not a sloop of war, was ‘highly improper for so long a voyage’, Selkirk wrote on 14 September, pointing out that the ship’s establishment did not include ‘a Lieutenant, or any Marines’. Marines essentially served the role of the commander’s security force, and Cook had never sailed on his Pacific voyages with fewer than twelve.

But perhaps most troubling to Lord Selkirk was the issue of Bligh’s own status: ‘I was sorry to find…Mr. Bligh himself is but very indifferently used, or rather I think realy ill used,’ Selkirk had written with some force. ‘It would have been scrimply Justice to him to have made him Master & Commander before sailing: nay considering that he was, I believe, the only person that was not in some way or other prefer’d at their return of all who went last out with Capt. Cook, it would be no unreasonable thing to make him Post Captain now.’ Cook, on his very first Pacific voyage, had also sailed as a lieutenant – but the prestige of that voyage had never been in question.

Although Selkirk did not disclose the fact, he was an old friend of Bligh’s father-in-law, Richard Betham, and it is probable that he had been leaned upon to communicate family concerns to Banks. These concerns were openly expressed in the farewell letter Betham himself wrote to Bligh a week later, offering his good wishes for the long voyage ahead: ‘I own I have a different Idea of [the voyage] from what I had conceived before I was acquainted with the Circumstances of the Vessel, & the manner in which it is fitted out,’ he told his son-in-law. ‘Government I think have gone too frugally to work: Both the Ship and the Complement of Men are too small in my opinion for such a voyage. Lord Howe may understand Navy matters very well, but I suppose mercantile Projects are treated by him with Contempt.’

‘Contempt’ is perhaps too strong a word; but the accumulation of troubling details – the miserably small ship, the determinedly lower rating, Bligh’s own status and the apparent lack of urgency in getting sailing orders – tend to suggest that collecting breadfruit in Tahiti was not at the top of the Admiralty’s list. Among other things, England seemed poised for yet another war, this time with Holland.

‘Every thing here wears the appearance of War being at hand,’ Duncan Campbell had written to a Jamaican colleague on 29 September. ‘Seaman’s Wages & every naval Store have of course risen to War prices.’ To an Admiralty intent on mobilizing ships and men, the Bounty’s breadfruit run to the Pacific was only a distraction. Three weeks would pass before Bligh received his sailing orders, by which time the fair conditions had changed.

On 28 November 1787, Bligh headed the Bounty out to sea, and got as far as St Helens on the Isle of Wight, an inconsequential distance, where he was forced to anchor. For the next twenty-four days, the Bounty bounced between Spithead and St Helens as each successive attempt to get down Channel failed in the teeth of contrary winds. Master Fryer and William Peckover, the gunner, were laid up by the bad weather with ‘rheumatic complaints’ and a number of his men had severe colds. Resentment and anxiety that had been mounting in Bligh for months rose to the fore.

‘If there is any punishment that ought to be inflicted on a set of Men for neglect I am sure it ought on the Admiralty for my three weeks detention at this place during a fine fair wind which carried all outward bound ships clear of the channel but me, who wanted it most,’ Bligh fumed in a letter to Duncan Campbell. It was 10 December, and he was back at St Helens, pinned in the cabin. This has made my task a very arduous one indeed for to get round Cape Horn at the time I shall be there. I know not how to promise myself any success and yet I must do it if the ship will stand it at all or I suppose my character will be at stake. Had Lord Howe sweetened this difficult task by giving me promotion I should have been satisfied.’

The question of promotion worried Bligh grievously. At the very least, as he had written to Banks, ‘that one step would make a material difference to Mrs. Bligh and her children in case of any accident to me.’ Moved by Bligh’s entreaties, Banks personally approached Lord Howe, the revered First Lord of the Admiralty, but without success, being told such advancement ‘was designed intirely as a reward to those who had engaged in the War equipment’; in other words, breadfruit expeditions did not count.

The hardship I make known I lay under, is that they took me from a state of affluence from your employ,’ Bligh continued, unburdening himself to Duncan Campbell, ‘with an income five hundred a Year to that of Lieut’s pay 4/- per day to perform a Voyage which few were acquainted with sufficiently to ensure it any degree of success.’

But interest had gone as far as it could. Meanwhile, if war was indeed at hand, this would be the occasion for promotions, although not for Lieutenant Bligh, off in the Pacific.

‘Poor fellow,’ Campbell would say of Bligh, somewhat later. Ignobly batted back and forth across the Channel entrance, Bligh, while not quite getting cold feet, was clearly assessing the risks of the voyage to which he was committed. Low pay was to have been compensated by promotion and the prestige of the undertaking; but there was no promotion and the prestige had already evaporated. Frustrated, demoralized, already tested by the weather, Bligh had not yet even left England.

‘It is wished to impress it strongly on your mind that the whole success of the undertaking depends ultimately upon your diligence and care,’ Banks wrote in an oppressively stern letter to the poor gardener David Nelson – but the warning applied equally to Bligh. ‘And that your future prospects in life will greatly depend upon your conduct on this occasion.’

One person on board, at least, benefited from the delay in the Bounty’s departure. Thanks to the rough weather, Fletcher Christian was able to meet his brother Charles, who had recently returned to England on the Middlesex, the East Indiaman on which he had been ship’s surgeon.

‘When the Middlesex returned from India, the Bounty lay near to where she was moored,’ Charles Christian recounted in an unpublished memoir many years later. ‘Fletcher came on Board coming up the River, and he and I and one of our Officers who had been in the Navy went on Shore, and spent the Evening and remained till next Day.’ There were family matters to discuss; their sister Mary had died in her twenty-sixth year, more than eighteen months before; their youngest brother, Humphrey, was soon to go to Africa. Doubtless, too, the brothers conferred over family finances. Things were looking up for Fletcher who, returned from the West Indies, could report that he was now off to Tahiti, with Cook’s sailing master.

But all of this was overshadowed by the news Charles Christian had to tell his younger brother. Certain events had transpired on the Middlesex that had shaken him to his core – indeed, they were eventually to lead to his mental breakdown. Two weeks before the arrival of the Middlesex in England, Charles Christian had been involved in a mutiny.

Trouble had begun as early as Fort Saint George, in Madras. David Fell, the second officer, claimed that he had been unlawfully confined on the ship, and that the governor of the fort had interceded and ordered him released. The Company’s surviving records tend to bear this out, showing that in July 1787 the Directors praised the governor for the ‘manner in which you interfered in the Disputes on board the Middlesex.’

The real trouble came to a head two months later, however, as the ship approached English shores. On 5 September, according to the log of Captain John Rogers, Mr Grece, seaman, was placed in irons ‘for Presenting a Loaded Pistol to my Breast with a threat that he would put the first Man to death who would offer to touch him.’ The first and second officers attempted to aid John William Grece and were dismissed ‘for aiding & assisting in the above Mutinous Conspiracy’ as well as ‘for Drunkeness, Insolent Language & striking at me on the Quarter Deck…The Surgeon also in the Conspiracy.’

Two days later, George Aitken, the dismissed first officer, came on deck when Captain Rogers was present, an action the captain interpreted as hostile. Calling on his other officers, Rogers had Aitken and David Fell confined below, ‘battened them both in their Cabbins,’ with a scuttle cut in the door for air. Twelve days later, the Middlesex reached the Downs, the sheltered anchorage between Dover and the Thames estuary.